{"id":25090,"date":"2011-07-01T02:58:13","date_gmt":"2011-07-01T02:58:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/once-in-a-while-someone-will-say-something-thats\/"},"modified":"2011-07-01T02:58:13","modified_gmt":"2011-07-01T02:58:13","slug":"once-in-a-while-someone-will-say-something-thats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/once-in-a-while-someone-will-say-something-thats\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote>\n<p>Once in a while, someone will say something that&rsquo;s so self-evidently true, and so unexpected, that you&rsquo;ll spend the rest of your life working through its implications. For me, one such truth is &ldquo;A publisher makes a work public, it connects a work and an audience&rdquo;, and the person who said it is my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden, senior editor at Tor Books, the largest science fiction publisher in the world. I first heard Patrick say this a decade or more ago, sometime after Google was founded, but before it was the enormous powerhouse it is today. Patrick was talking about the role of a publisher, and how it might change as a consequence of the internet. As soon as he said it, something clicked for me: the Flatiron Building, the famous skyscraper in midtown Manhattan that houses Tor and its parent company, Macmillan, is essentially in three businesses. <\/p>\n<p>The first is identifying works for which it believes there may be an audience: reading slush (the uncharitable but accurate term for unsolicited manuscripts), entertaining agent pitches, and scouting around for writers to solicit. <\/p>\n<p>Then there is the process of taking steps to prepare the work so that it will be of interest to that audience: editing, typesetting, proofreading, packaging, adding art and design elements. <\/p>\n<p>The third business is connecting the work to the audience: writing catalogue copy and distributing catalogues, despatching a salesforce to major retail and wholesale channels, soliciting testimonials, placing ads, soliciting reviews, touring authors, and these days, producing internet collateral from accompanying videos to online chats to full-blown game tie-ins.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div class='attribution'><a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/technology\/2011\/jun\/30\/publishers-internet-changing-role?utm_source=twitterfeed&amp;utm_medium=twitter\">Publishers and the internet: a changing role | Cory Doctorow | Technology | guardian.co.uk<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Once in a while, someone will say something that&rsquo;s so self-evidently true, and so unexpected, that you&rsquo;ll spend the rest of your life working through its implications. For me, one such truth is &ldquo;A publisher makes a work public, it connects a work and an audience&rdquo;, and the person who said it is my editor [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","category-words","post_format-post-format-quote"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-6wG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25090"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25090\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}